Filicide
by wearwind
Summary: On the hill of Moriah, a father raises a knife to kill his son. An angel intervenes. A devil has a few thoughts. There is a ram.


And so it came to pass that on the hill of Moriah, when a certain pious father was hardening his soul to a flint in order to suffer the insufferable, an angel spake unto him:

"What on earth are you doing, good man?"

Abraham let go of the dagger. It landed on the bone-dry ground with a very relieved thud. "I am here, my Lord," he said, "and I obey."

"Of course," said the angel, who was beginning to wonder whether giving human beings their free will was just some sort of spiffing yet unexplainable joke, one of those he was too low in the Hierarchy to get. "No knives over children, now, there's a good lad." With a sleight of angelic hand the ropes binding Isaac to the stone tablet fell apart. The boy scrambled to his feet, very wisely keeping as far away from his father as possible. "God wants you to know that He is pleased you were willing to go so far. Thusly, you shall be rewarded." The angel gestured with his wing, pointing at a stray ram that had miraculously appeared tangled in the thickets, baahing unhappily at being brought to existence so unceremoniously.

Abraham stared. He had a face of a man that just gambled horribly wrong. "The ram is the reward?"

"Oh, golly, no," said the angel, giving a nervous chuckle. "I just need you to finish the ritual first before I tell you more. Think of the ram as a free sample."

Mumbling something under his breath, Abraham procured the ram – both Isaac and the angel cringed from head to feathertip, or toe, when the knife opened up a gushing flower of blood – and prepared the burnt offering. When the smell of charred flesh filled the air, the angel spake unto Abraham again:

"Because you have not denied Him your son, He will bless you, and He will multiply your offspring as the stars in heaven and sand on seashore—"

"Wait," said Isaac. "You tried to kill me because you wanted more children?"

Abraham had the decency to look devastated. "It's a great blessing, my son."

"—and they shall possess the gates of their enemies," the angel continued, candidly curious about the conversation about to happen, but also very aware that he still had a job to do. "And in them shall all nations on the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice. Thus says the Lord."

"How literal is He being about that offspring multiplication?" asked Isaac, looking faintly sick. The angel cleared his throat.

"Well, you see, there's no reason a human being should have a mammalian reproductive system rather than that, say, a frog, especially with the whole post-flood Creation being relatively new and open to modification—"

"It's a metaphor," said Abraham, sending the angel a stormy look. "My children and yours, my son. I did it for us. We will be patriarchs of a great and blessed people! It was just a trial," he added in a smaller voice, suddenly very interested in his sandals. "The Lord would've never allowed it to actually happen."

Isaac was looking sceptical. "Didn't you have to really mean it for the angel to come down?"

"But I also believed really, really hard that He'd stop me."

"That," Isaac said after a long moment of deliberation, "is a lot of trust in a God that drowned the whole of mankind to start over."

Abraham opened his mouth to argue, and then turned to glare at the angel, who was watching the entire exchange with open curiosity. "Do you mind?" he growled.

"Oh," said the angel, puffing up his feathers very much like a pigeon shooed off a particularly promising ledge. "Do excuse me." Then he vanished in a puff of white mist.

"Now, my son—" started Abraham again, hoping to God that He at least had a plan to change the boy's mind around, because the more he thought about it, the more sharp and menacing the knife at his feet looked. Now that his leap of faith was over, he stared at the rocky ground around him, and started wondering what if he'd fallen slightly to the left.

A queit baah reached them from the sacrificial tablet. Abraham and Isaac turned their heads sharply to stare back at the ram, shaken but very much alive, standing next to the sacrificial fire and looking very confused at the still-burning _chevon a la Abraham_.

Abraham looked at the ram. Then at the white mist still twinkling in the air. Then back at the ram, who was beginning to realise that this time, his impressively pointed horns were not caught in the thickets, and that he was in an optimal distance to charge.

Abraham crossed glances with Isaac. Miraculously, there was agreement there.

"Run!"

-/-

Half a hair's breath away, on a slightly different light spectrum, a dimension unseen but for some reason partially audible to the more robust physical world – presumably because every once in a while a bodiless whisper could go a long way – a snake slithered to Aziraphale's feet and turned into a very impressed Crowley. "That was almost mean."

"I don't know what you're talking about," said the angel primly, dusting off the inexistent dirt off his white robe. (Even though angelic beings need naught more than the Lord's light to clothe themselves, over the last few centuries he'd begun to really appreciate various fabrics as well. Right now he had very high hopes for some worms that produced particularly fine-spun cocoons, and intended to bring them to someone's attention as soon as possible.) "It's just an extra sprinkling of goodness. I just made that ram, you know. What would we be if we brought things to life just to kill them a moment later?"

"God?" suggested Crowley. Aziraphale shuddered.

"Of course not. See? The boy lives, and Abraham's line will stretch thought history until the world without end. All according to the Great Plan."

"I don't know, man," said Crowley, who had slithered around the stone tablet when Abraham had been binding Isaac to it, and had a better idea of how close the murder had come to happening. "Why even ask them to do it? It's pretty revolting to give them the Thou Shall Not Kill and then tell them to break it. Like He told everyone not to get Him anything for His birthday, and still expect one."

"That's not it," corrected Aziraphale automatically. "It would be more like telling them not to get Him anything on the threat of eternal damnation, then tell them to prove their love for Him by getting Him a gift anyway, and then destroying the gift by the last minute— ahem." He cleared his throat with the _harrumph _saying clearly _we will not mention this again. _"Anyway, they both walked away with a blessing, so there's that."

"Well, _I_ think," said Crowley thoughtfully, observing through the thin layer dividing realities how Abraham and Isaac tumble down the hill of Moriah, chased by vengeful baahing, "that they messed up and He had to cover it up."

Aziraphale snorted indignantly. "I hardly think He makes mistakes of the sort, my dear boy."

"Think about it," insisted Crowley. "There's that – Law, Testament, tablets, whatever, and they've given humans the right to self-describe, right? Right, wrong, knowledge which is which, the whole apple business."

"You're awfully single-minded, Crowley—"

"So then this guy here," Crowley made a broad gesture at Abraham, who was climbing the acacia tree surprisingly vigorously for a hundred-something-year-old, "is supposed to be the most righteous of them all. Knows his rights and wrongs. So, He might think that there's a test for him. Tell Abraham to do something so incredibly vile, but _make him do it _as his God! And then, between the right that he knows for himself, and the wrong that comes from a higher power, the Human could have a chance to come into his own—"

"That was a test of love and sacrifice," said Aziraphale, albeit tentatively. Crowley shook his head.

"No," he said. "This is."

A shadow's breadth away from them, a branch cracked. Abraham was slipping from the tree, clinging to it like a cat to a boiler over a bath. Except the bath was an abruptly descending slope riddled with sharp stones.

Safe in the higher branch, Isaac looked his father in the face, and hesitated – and then pulled him up.

Aziraphale smiled at the sudden burst of relief and forgiveness vibrating though the air.

"He would've _killed his son,_" said Crowley, casting him a dark glance.

"But he didn't!"

"Only because you stepped in."

"Now, now," said Aziraphale, who had been feeling a peculiar, unfamiliar sense of dread throughout the whole conversation, and just now discovered that the new feeling could very possibly be _uncertainty. _"I just delivered my message. Which was tailored to the situation, by the way, so all went according to the Plan."

"So, if there was just one outcome," said Crowley, "what about this whole free will business?"

Aziraphale stared at him, a little bit helpless and majorly miffed. "Maybe there were two versions of the Plan."

"Precisely."

Aziraphale shot him an indignant glance, annoyed to have played into the devil's hand, and tried to cuss. "Ram… droppings."

"Almost there," complimented him Crowley. "I do think it was a failed test. Turns out, humans are pretty horrible at doing the right thing under pressure."

"He's led them so far," said Aziraphale, internally probing at the all-new cloud of uncertainty that seemed to fill what his lungs would be, had he any need for lungs at the moment. "They might be too used to following."

"Maybe He just got too excited."

"_Crowley!_"

The devil shrugged. "All I'm saying is, maybe they're just a little too young for this sort of responsibility."

Aziraphale's wings flopped down. On the tree half a shadow away, father and son were talking, trying to explain the unexplainable, rationalising their own humanity into something they could live with from now own. Ahead of them, in a dimension of mythical time, the line of Abraham and Isaac was stretching out like a glimmering thread, binding their reconciliation with the other end of eternity. That choice had been made, but there was a myriad of others ahead; and then, perhaps, a Plan for each.

"Maybe some other time," Aziraphale conceded.

-/-

_Warsaw, 18.09.2019_

_-/-_

_-/-_

_-/-_

_Good Omens is one my favourite books ever, but I never really felt the need to write anything to it - it's pretty much complete and satisfying the way it is, really. Then Neil Gaiman happened to add this entire TV sequence about Aziraphale and Crowley meeting throughout centuries, and lo, the floodgates have opened. It's just such a world of possibilities to imagine them in all those different settings, bickering about the Plan and slowly falling in love. _

_Thus the Ineffable Collaboration was born: my friend and I are writing up their meetings as a series of one-shots. Subscribe to the collection below if you wanna read more. Or, even better - do you want to see them somewhere at a particular point in history? Let me know in the comments, and there's like 66% chance I'll reply with a ready vignette :D _

_See ya in the comments, angels._


End file.
